Don’t Forget to Visit the Art House

Now that we’ve reached the tentative end of the 2026 summer blockbuster season, it’s time to rejoice that “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” made billions at the box office. Movie theaters might just be safe for the foreseeable future. However, wrapped inside that rejoicing is room to lament that so many indie and arthouse films still never find an audience. While I love that people still turn up for the big ones, even something categorized as independent — like “Obsession” — is still released by a major distributor with millions of dollars set aside in the marketing budget.

Prepare for one hell of a road trip with these “Idiots” Credit: Mubi

Every few months, I’m going to check in on the state of arthouse cinema and see how healthy it is, while championing a few smaller movies that will inevitably get overlooked when the massive, four-quadrant crowdpleasers take up finite space at the multiplex and, sometimes, even the arthouse. Here are a couple worth catching in theaters while you still can.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma:” Just your typical meta slasher comedy romance that exists not just as a winking love letter to movies and filmmaking, but as a tender romance that embraces our particularities involving sex, gender and the walls we build around both.

This is filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature, with each subtly and lavishly deconstructing a different medium. With their debut, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” they unpacked the numbing dysphoria of the internet. Their second, “I Saw the T.V. Glow,” found a lonely, heartbreaking transgender allegory in the obsession two disparate friends shared for a cult television show. With “Camp Miasma,” Schoenbrun completes a thematically linked Pop Autopsy Trilogy that cements them as one of the most original, essential filmmakers working today.

The film follows a gorgeously translucent Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot the long-running “Camp Miasma” slasher franchise, which has been cheap and laughable for years. Kris tracks down Billy Presley (a hypnotic, luminous Gillian Anderson), the original film’s final girl, who abruptly retired from acting decades earlier, to convince her to star. When Kris goes to stay with Billie on the abandoned Camp Miasma campgrounds, they descend (and ascend) into a cathartic explosion of campy horror, esoteric film geekery, the ephemeral center of art and so very many orgasms.

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, together at last. Credit: IFC

Most people will find this movie along a spectrum of pretentious and impenetrable, but all of the thematic depth and meaning is right there for the digging. It’s a strangely beautiful catharsis meant to help everyone who feels unheard find their voice and choose whether to use it to sing or scream. Every frame of this film is beautiful to behold. Catch it on the big screen if you can.

“Idiots:” I’m not sure “Idiots” is a great film, or even a very good one, but it made me laugh harder than any other comedy I’ve seen all year and that’s worth something to me. Writer/director Macon Blair — whose filmmaking debut was the criminally underseen oddity, “I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore” and who gave one of the truly undersung performances of the 2010s in “Blue Ruin” — crafts “Idiots” like an orchestra conductor clawing his way out of a K-hole.

The film follows Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as two, yes, idiots who are hired to drive a rich, sociopathic teenager from his parents’ mansion across the state to rehab. Across their odyssey, there are strippers, kidnappings, Killer Mike, robberies, werewolf-obsessed SoundCloud rappers, Peter Dinklage and many questionable drugs.

“Idiots” is a little thin in the screenplay department, but Blair knows how to build sequences around Franco and Jackson that are so ridiculously outlandish it’s hard not to be charmed by the messiness. You won’t feel smarter after watching it, but you might fall in love with Dave Franco’s greasy charisma so hard you’ll beg for a sequel that will probably never come.

Honestly, I want 10 movies with Franco and Jackson, where each one escalates so improbably that by the fifth entry they’re doing molly in space, or getting chased by a cartel in Brazil while huffing paint and forgetting how to drive. It could be the thematic inversion of “The Fast and the Furious” franchise. Maybe call it “The Slow and the Cognitively Impaired,” or “The Hungry and the Slightly Confused.”

Have fun with this one, just don’t think too hard about it.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”

Dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Grade: A-

Now playing at Regal Old Mill and coming soon to Tin Pan Theater

“Idiots”

Dir. Macon Blair

Grade: B-

Opens worldwide Aug. 28